Posted
by
timothy
on Friday November 23, 2012 @05:30PM
from the you-must-watch-and-hear-this-ad dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Computerworld asks: What will happen if big advertisers declare AdBlock Plus a clear and present danger to online business models? Hint: it will probably involve lawyers. From the article: 'Could browser ad blocking one day become so prevalent that it jeopardises potentially billions of dollars of online ad revenue, and the primary business models of many online and new media businesses? If so, it will inevitably face legal attack.'"

Seems to me that if an advertising scheme is so obnoxious that an entire category of software arises to block it, then it's the fault of the medium of advertising being too invasive, too obnoxious. Not the fault of the people who block it.

Officially, we're not cattle. So when did making a buck off me start to take precedence over everything in the Bill of Rights?

That's not just a figure of speech. As the (great?)grandparent comment says, it's about impressions. There's plenty of evidence (1 [uchicago.edu], 2 [le.ac.uk], 3 [wiley.com], for instance) that ads have the most effect on behavior when you're not paying attention. So the only way for me to stop manipulation of my own mind is not to have those ads in the background in the first place.

But advertisers have some sacred "right" to make a buck that's more important than me making my own decisions. Which is even weirder because, I'm told, the free market depends on informed consumers making free choices.

Let's face it. Advertisers are gunning for a world where our eyelids are propped open with matchsticks while we watch whatever we're told to watch.

But advertisers have some sacred "right" to make a buck that's more important than me making my own decisions.

It's not some right of the advertisers that's at issue. It's about whether the author/publisher of the original work containing the link to the ads has the right to demand you view the ads that pay him if you view his work, or whether your right to cut out the ads and only view the remainder takes precedence.

Now if the advertisers and the authors really wanted to get you to see the ads, they could literally embed the text of the ad in the text of the work, rather than embedding an easy-to-filter link. (This could be done automagically at the server.) Then you'd need some serious A.I. to do the cutting. But that would also make it harder for the advertiser to track how often the ad was seen (he'd have to trust the server) and eliminate the obnoxious graphic and animated ads.

(And they ARE obnoxious. I just started a new contract and the customer's I.T. department deployed Chrome with substantially less ad protection than the firefox+adblock plus+flashblock I'm used to. Popups/overs/unders are supposedly blocked, but the animated garbage and the mouse-over stuff that pops out and covers the screen I'm trying to read are horribly annoying, and they HAVE to be sucking up a lot of network bandwidth. If advertisers had just stuck to still images scattered around the page it wouldn't have attracted so much work on countermeasures.)

If content creators embedded graphics and text in the article I'd be fine with that. I don't expect to tear pages out of a magazine before I read it and those suckers are full of ads. The problem is, as you ably stated, the animated crap. I've had access to ad-skipping on TV for around a decade. I can not watch TV advertisements. I will leave a room and rest my fevered brow against an exterior wall before I'll watch one. Unless I hear about a clever ad then I'll trawl Youtube until I find it. So, in summary, make better ads.

The animated crap isn't the only problem. Another problem is the potential for malware. As long as $TRUSTED_SITE sells generic ad space to $USUALLY_REPUTABLE_ADVERTISING_COMPANY who accepts ads from $NAIVE_BUSINESS that's been hacked by $EVIL_CRACKERS, or for that matter doesn't do enough checking and accepts ads from $SHADY_COMPANY, running any ad executables is going to be dangerous. My wife got a computer infected from the New York Times. I assume they've done some work on making sure it doesn't happen again, but it's going to be something of a contest between screening methods and sneaky black hats, and if anybody in the chain decides not to protect you by not accepting money from an advertiser, you can be in trouble.

I don't use ABP. The ads haven't bothered me enough. I do use NoScript.

I loathe the ancient flash ads and banner adsbut what absolutely annoys me more than ANYTHING, is this

When sites make an article run over 10-15 pages to force more ads (that i dont see anyway with my tools) There is one or 2 sites out there that I need that do their layouts this way, usually when im looking at benchmarks, but these are the ones that annoy the hell out of me, and the worst thing is I have yet found a way around it.

As long as the actual rendering of the page takes place on my computer - on MY property by MY terms - I have the right to modify the content shown on MY computer loaded from MY RAM. As long as I don't modify the original content on THEIR server, which would be shown to everyone else as well, I have done nothing wrong.

This makes me steaming mad because it is basically advertisers saying "We are too stupid/lazy to come up with a new, less outdated business model, so make them conform to our decade-old adfarm server methods."

If a page hosts their own ads, locally, and they aren't from some servenet adfarm bullshit, they will probably show up even with something like AdBlockPlus installed. You can manually block them, but you can do mostly the same thing with any element, of any page, anywhere, using a plugin like FireBug.

It's about whether the author/publisher of the original work containing the link to the ads has the right to demand you view the ads that pay him if you view his work, or whether your right to cut out the ads and only view the remainder takes precedence.

That's easy to answer.

He doesn't.

He does have the right to distribute his work under his own terms. He does not have a right to determine how I consume said work. He can try to force me through technological means, but not through legal means.

If you want to make sure you are paid for your work, there is already a system we have in place for doing so, it's called selling it, aka taking my money before you give me your product. It's really simple, it works, and it is quite common.

uh no a libertarian would support both the business right to embed the ad AND the consumer right to block it on his equipment. please get a clue about what libertarians are about instead of getting your definitions from the new york times and cnn.

Heh, it's more like:
1) can we break this
2) is it easy to do so
3) can we get away with it
4) get we something out of it (real or assumed)
if all 4 can be answered with yes, then a lot of people do so, even the reward is just a giggle. Hence vandalism, animal torture, uprooted plants, names scratched in objects/trees, shop lifting, graffiti, you name it.
Advertising is always obnoxious no matter how subtle it's done.

I own a small movie theatre and advertise what's playing and what's coming with a webpage and an email mailing list.

People actively seek out and view the webpage hundreds of times per day, and I have a fair number of people who have signed up to receive automatic notifications of what's playing when I have a confirmed booking for a new movie.

I don't think that my advertising is "obnoxious", since it's information that people are actually searching for and obviously want to receive.

Notice how you didn't say "I spam my oversized/bliking/popup banner all over other sites to get people to view my webpage"? People find your page because you provide information they need, not because they see your ads. Personally, I can honestly say that not once in my life have I read/viewed/purchased anything from clicking a banner. And yeah, I know the whole subconscious brand recognition shpeel... Still - I never buy anything on the brand name alone. Except for Sony, their products I don't buy specifically because of their brand name. But I digress.

And this is the reason I block all ad server contents to my network. Almost every virus I have ever found on one of our systems has come from an ad impression.

If the advertising servers want to get picky about me blocking the content provided by or through them, then they better be ready for a class action lawsuit for for the malware and inappropriate content they facilitate through their services

If they offered up accurate, honest and safe advertising, I would have little issue with that. The problem is most ads fail on two of three. I will not let the kids be bombarded with lies, lies, lies. I will not leave the network open to malware via advertisements. I will not allow cross site scripts/content to run from anything but highly trusted sites. None of the ad sites qualify in those cases.

To the advertisers. When I want something, I look for it. I read the content I can find on the Internet. If it is too *advertisy*, I typically close that page and go on. Stop making trash ads and start making truly informative, reviewable honest ads. Maybe I would be inclined to read it if it was not the utter nonsense that is normally spouted out.

BTW - I do subscribe to email notices of things I am interested in. I do bookmark and watch sites of products that I am interested in. I do communicate with my friends and family about sites that are full of poppycock to avoid them and their products. I am a modern customer, and I demand intelligent honest marketing that is neither blatant nor unwanted.

As to revenue generation, I'm more often seeing good websites put up "shameless commerce divisions" nobody goes to a website wanting to get spammed with 3rd party ads, but I'm sometimes elated to see a cool tshirt or neat plushie being sold by the site itself. That may not be quite as profitable, but it's a much less aggravating way to be advertized to, and has much better relevance overall.

BoingBoing's shop comes to mind. It's benefitting a site I like, while not constantly being spammy

How about users sue advertisers for gumming up their internet bandwidth, raising the cost of service and slowing down their performance. Many ad burdened pages have loading issues, and eat up extra bandwidth. Many sites I have never returned to due to the ads on the site. Here is another hint for marketers.. It is a smart medium where most of the people not on a few of the service (facebook, mypage, etc.) are intelligent users who are not going to fall for the ad game as normal. Many left TV for the sa

...but for a lot of the best content on the web there has to be some sort of revenue stream.... The fact is that you're bragging about leeching off the current system so I hope you have a way to replace it.

The way to replace it is to go backwards just a little bit. The following would also cut down on a massive amount of useless noise.

It wasn't always just a couple handfuls of really big sites with content from loads of various sources, and the web was not originally intentioned for that behavior. Think about the sites that would really be hurt the most sans-ads, like hulu, youtube, facebook, pinterest, gmail, blogs, etc. They have one big "provider" servicing loads of content from lots of various content ge

Apparently the abuse of the word "stealing" by the MAFIAA is starting to cause etymological damage among the public. While you have every right to discontinue your business or to control access to it, you damn well do not get to open your doors to the public and then claim that if they come in and look at your wares without buying they are somehow "stealing". There is no "right" for any given business model to be profitable.

If you (and other businessmen) are worried that obnoxious, overdone ads are damaging the effectiveness of ads, then they (and you) need to STOP the people who are abusing advertising by throwing seizure-inducing crap in my face. Or, at the least, create a discriminating group of curated and trusted advertisers whose content we, the users, can trust to not adversely effect our use of the web. What you don't need to do is to sue your potential customers in pursuit of some imaginary god-given right to profit no matter what.

You got it completely wrong. You can't put something online for free and demand that visitors cover your costs. It's not up to the users to make sure you're profitable, you are. Sure, put up ads, have a store, donate button, something else but if you're not making enough money, then too bad. Having a website is no different than the guy standing on a street playing a guitar. People can stop an listen if they want and put a coin in the cup if they want, his only revenue source. But if someone listens to a song and then walks away without giving a thing, don't you dare say that person is stealing. Either your site works as a business or it doesn't. If is doesn't, take it down and move on to something else. People probably won't miss it. Only when really good content starts disappearing will people be willing to pay to keep it there.

fuck you.. we paid for our bandwidth, you pay for yours.. we aren't required to jump through your hoops to prop up your business model. go get a real job and get off the net. For the last time, the internet is not fucking cable television

but you're seeing things from an end-user perspective. Businesses and lawyers see things from a... business and money-making perspective. In that respect, the answer can actually only be "yes".

There are many examples of the legal system being used to preserve outdated and irrelevant business models that quite clearly fly in the face of expressed consumer demand (RIAA anyone?). This looks like it won't be any exception, unfortunately.

Because it is based on the server name and not the (rotating/round robin/whatever) IP address.

Here's a few lines from my hosts file. Servers get added when either they are obnoxious ads, or the ad server/ad network is slow to respond and keeps the rest of the page from loading while it waits for an image...

The problem is, websites cannot easily detect if the user has ad-block deployed for their site.

The fair way to solve this problem, is that the site should be able to first query the client if ad-blocking is deployed, and, if so, then decide whether it wants to deploy content or not. Fair for both sides.

Step #1: User clicks on a link.

Step #2: Web site shows mostly blank image, requesting that user first whitelist this site from ad-blocking, then hitting refresh once done

Except that it's more like:Step 1. User loads page.Step 2. Page uses JavaScript to display page.Step 3. I go elsewhere, because frankly, fuck 'em.Step 4. Anyone else who doesn't have JS enabled does the same.Step 5. JS can be used to detect whether external ads are loading or not, and block those that don't load external ads.------

I don't have an ad blocker. I use Request Policy to block external requests (and whitelist and temporary whitelist if I want external content in a web page). This blocks most ads by default, without any extra work on my part. I also use NoScript. This blocks more ads, especially as I'm not about to whitelist the ad domains. I finally use a cookie manager that blocks cookies by default (and I whitelist certain domains).

The only ads I see are the ones that don't use JS, and are served from the same domain as the website I'm viewing. Though I was certainly thinking about blocking a moving graphic ad recently...

-----So, yeah, websites can detect if you have JS enabled, and use that to detect if ads are being displayed. And I'll say fuck you to the parasites and find my sources of entertainment, news, and community elsewhere. I'd be perfectly happy if all ad supported websites went out of business (I'm not counting those that have ads for their own products though, just those with ads from external sources). Just like if broadcast TV were to go elsewhere because everyone skipped the ads, I wouldn't care at all either.

I understand why you don't like ads and I support your right to avoid them, but are you sure you understand who is exhibiting parasitic behavior in this situation?

Let's see.

The person running the web site. Seriously. They're accepting money from the advertising company that provides the ads. The advertising company ultimately gets nothing out of the deal because I - the viewer - am not going to buy their crap. Ergo the ad-funded web site owner is the parasite, feeding upon the false assumptions of the advertising industry.

Not good enough? Let's try again.

The advertising company providing the ads. They are using my compute resources and bandwidth to display content that is offensive to me. Without asking my permission, they utilize my time as well, consuming the moments my brain spends viewing their intrusion. While it can be argued that I benefit in the form of the content I DO want being paid for by the ads, there are other revenue models that mysteriously work for much content.

Just a thought... we - the consumers - should be suing the advertising industry (out of existence). If their model is snake-oil and does not work (as in generate sales) then they should be persecuted as frauds. If their model is effective and "generates" sales, they are guilty of the monetary equivalent of date-rape. Their images, sound clips, product-placement and so on act to manipulate us into spending money we do not otherwise wish to spend. It's coercion. It's just like hypnotizing their "marks" and "suggesting" the target voluntarily empties their wallet. If advertising works, it's disgusting.

And I'll say fuck you to the parasites and find my sources of entertainment, news, and community elsewhere. I'd be perfectly happy if all ad supported websites went out of business (I'm not counting those that have ads for their own products though, just those with ads from external sources).

Just out of curiosity, I'd like to point out that all search engines are ad supported. And, for that matter, Slashdot. You don't want to be able to use Google or Bing (and by extension, pretty much any other search like DuckDuckGo), or do you have some other business model to propose?

A new business model to propose? How about information should always be free? Isn't that what honest white hat hackers have been saying for decades now?

Information may want to be free, but gathering, collating, prioritizing and publishing information will never be free. It takes effort by someone, and there's a strong correlation between the amount of effort and the cost, even with computers to automate much of it. Now, that doesn't mean that anyone should be forced to pay for it, but it does mean that if there isn't a way for people to make a living doing it, it won't get done. Crowd-sourcing can effectively extract small amounts of volunteer effort from large numbers of people, and as a result produce something for free that would cost a lot if produced by a smaller, full-time group. But that model isn't applicable to everything.

Web search is a good example of an area in which it doesn't work well. Your UID is high, so you may be young enough that you don't remember the crowd-sourced predecessor of web search. I'm old, and I do remember it well. People collected bookmarks and published their huge lists of links on web pages. Groups collaborated to curate and organize these bookmark collections. Web site owners lobbied to get their links added. In the (tiny!) Internet of the day, it worked, sort of -- though the most popular bookmark collections had enough hardware and bandwidth costs that even with volunteer labor they had to resort to banner ads to pay the bills, so it doesn't really fit your ideal.

As the web grew, though, the approach became very, very hard to maintain. Yahoo! was considered the pre-eminent solution -- a large, curated, categorized directory of links maintained by a large group of full-time employees and funded by banner advertising. Even that, though, was being massively outpaced. Enter Google, which did fit your paradigm -- it was completely free. No ads, no fees, and thanks to its clever ranking algorithm it did approximately as good a job as the Yahoo! team... but it was able to scale much more easily. It wasn't necessary to add exponential people to keep up with the exponentially-growing web. And it could be free because its real estate and bandwidth was all donated by Stanford University, which means it was really primarily taxpayer funded. Labor and hardware was all donated by the founders, whose research project Google was. They, of course, lived on university stipends. Taxpayer-funded.

So, now, there is an "information wants to be free" business model that works, and scales: forcibly collecting money from everyone then doling it out (on some basis) to people who build and operate systems to collect and disseminate the information!

Except... it didn't scale. Not far enough. Eventually the hardware was overflowing the dorm room and the limit of even Stanford's patience with the exponentially-growing bandwidth consumption came to an end. Investment capital was obtained, real estate was leased (a house, actually -- Google finally obtained a garage) and a business was established, but one that didn't have any idea how to fund itself. Advertising was constantly suggested and rejected because the founders hated banner ads. They looked far and wide trying to find some way -- any way! -- to be able to keep doing what they were doing without advertising. Eventually, they caved, because there was no other way. Google had to become an advertising medium, or it had to close the doors. They held the line against allowing ads to pollute "organic" search results, and adopted a pay-per-click model based on a real-time auction for ad space that only permitted unobtrusive text ads which sought to be relevant to the user, but they had to go with ads.

I think the founders of Google are still unhappy about being in the advertising business (even though it has made them billionaires), but it's the only way anyone has found to provide a free service at a large scale, and a search engine is only useful if it covers the whole web.

you cannot win the war. Adblocking is mostly a way to stop anoyances for the user. This means, if you do such checks, then there will be some adblocking technique, which renders the "correct" page in the background, then extracts the content and displays it without ads.Same situation as before, but both sides need more resources to keep doing what they want to do. So just accept it... some people do not want to see ads, and they will block them.

The whole point of HTML's markup language is to separate structure from content so that client side devices can render the HTML (and XML/SGML) in a matter most appropriate for the user. It was planned from the onset that many different devices could render a page differently. For example, there used to be completely text based browsers and clearly they rendered pages differently than graphics based browsers. While I'm not sure if they were ever built, there were even discussions of audio based browsers for those who are sight impaired. The ability to modify how a page is displayed is central to the entire concept of HTML. Using an Adblock add-on is simply utilizing HTML in the way it was intended. If the publishers do not like it then there are many less flexible formats that render a page exactly how they want it -- most notably PDF files -- that they can use to publish their content.

Adblocking is an act of self defense. Too often has my system been halted to a crawl by Flash and bad JS. Also I have a 2gb mobile data plan. You trying to sell me stuff using resources I have to pay for is not acceptable.
If the adoids and other mad men showed some restraint then this wouldn't be such a big problem. Instead they do this LOOK AT ME BLINK FLASH BANG stuff that really gets in the way. Also targeted ads for stuff I searched for online is becoming creepy. I don't appreciate being stalked by cellphones I decided not to buy.

The subscription model works if you manage to get single sign on done(I don't want to memorize another password for another website) and if you get micropayments/subscriptions to a level that is practical and reasonable. People buy apps for a buck on a whim. I buy kindle newspaper editions on a whim. Yet in many cases payment gets in the way. For instance I was really interested getting the online edition of DER SPIEGEL(one of the few remaining respectable weeklies worldwide) for my tablet. Their subscription process mimicks what they had used for their print edition. I wasn't able to pay on Amazon. I wasn't able to pay via Google Play. I decided I didn't need it. If your process still uses snail mail, fax or me setting up monthly payments via online banking and a week-long approval process then you got no sale. Good luck with that ad revenue and dead tree editions.

No failed business practice has ever been successfully defended by a lawyer. They only can slow down the inevitable and become rich in the process.

Internet -> Adblock -> Router -> Ad-free internet. These devices already exist, it's only a matter of time before a major router manufacturer builds in black/whitelist support for ad blocking. AdBlock Plus is great, but if they want to escalate, we are prepared to go full out.

I just found "DroidWall", in the Google Playstore's "tools" section. Not meaning to be a shill for this little app, but for rooted android devices, it's a great little 'firewall'. I finally have a choice over what apps/games get an internet connection, regardless of its 'permissions'.This app should be s.o.p. for android, imo.

Because legal attacks have worked really, really well against anything that happens on the Internet. Taking down MegaUpload and The Pirate Bay eliminated piracy altogether, never to resurface again. Gone, dead, finished. Burying ad blocking services under lawsuits will totally never make them even more resilient and hard to pin down. No way that'd happen.

Because legal attacks have worked really, really well against anything that happens on the Internet. Taking down MegaUpload and The Pirate Bay eliminated piracy altogether, never to resurface again. Gone, dead, finished. Burying ad blocking services under lawsuits will totally never make them even more resilient and hard to pin down. No way that'd happen.

You can add napster as another case example. Did the legal battle on music piracy really change anything? No. What ended up happening was a handful of individuals were fined ridiculous amounts of money that they would never would make in their life time.

You know what changed everything? Having a legitimate alternative to being forced to pay $20 for an album with maybe only 2 or 3 descent songs on it. Cue itunes.

I've run across a few sites here and there that won't display any content unless I disable ad-blocking. I'm surprised this isn't more prevalent. Surely it's cheaper to pay a programmer to write some code than paying lawyers to do their thing.

Yep, exactly. Preventing ad block from working is quite easy to do. Most sites don't bother because only a small minority does it and that small minority tends to be disproportionately made up of the kooky anti-consumerist crowd anyway, who aren't worth advertising to due to their hatred of advertising in general. If ad blocking ever went mainstream you'd see more sites tying content to ads explicitly.

Most sites don't bother because only a small minority does it and that small minority tends to be disproportionately made up of the kooky anti-consumerist crowd anyway, who aren't worth advertising to due to their hatred of advertising in general. If ad blocking ever went mainstream you'd see more sites tying content to ads explicitly.

Perhaps they don't bother because the cost of entering an arms race would be too high. If any major site were to block adblock users, you would expect the plugin to quickly route around their attempts.

It will be the same as with P2P apps - a game of cat and mouse between the guys writing the ad blocking software and the web developers trying to detect its use. Ultimately the ad blockers will win because they control the client, so the web guys will resort to lawyers.

I assume that they're unable to directly detect AdBlock, but instead are checking to see if your browser has requested the advertising to load. If that kind of check becomes too popular, I imagine AdBlock (or similar software) will be modified to include a list of sites for which it doesn't completely block advertising, but merely stops it from actually rendering on your screen.

Could browser ad blocking one day become so prevalent that it jeopardises potentially billions of dollars of online ad revenue, and the primary business models of many online and new media businesses?

No. 99 percent of people don't bother blocking ads and 90 percent don't even know that you can block ads. This is a ridiculous question to ask, especially since ad blocking has been around for so many years with solutions ranging from a custom hosts file to browser plugins and built-in adblock (opera).

No. 99 percent of people don't bother blocking ads and 90 percent don't even know that you can block ads. This is a ridiculous question to ask, especially since ad blocking has been around for so many years with solutions ranging from a custom hosts file to browser plugins and built-in adblock (opera).

Bingo.

I'm very computer literate, I could block ads, but I don't. Why not?

a) I can't be bothered to invest the time in downloading the software, deploying it and doing whatever else is required.

That's pretty much how I see it as well. The other day my girlfriend said "hey you still have ads on gmail" and I responded "really? where?" I really don't noticed them any more. Not to say that every one should just man up and not care but it doesn't (in most cases) hurt you to have ads on your screen and the people putting them up make a few bucks at the same time, why go out of your way to pinch their pennies?

I could say the same, there's potentially trillions of dollars at stake if people don't pay me 1$ for every website they go to. I might have to start call a lawyer to see if it's possible to mandate this.

"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."

I'd love.. well.. no. I'd tolerate more ads on sites if they were safe. Here in the Netherlands, we've recently had infections go via nu.nl and nrc.nl. Both very respectable news websites and perfectly safe. If it wasn't for the trojans served via the ads.

Nowadays all ads are the enemy. Flash, Java and Adobe reader seem perma-broken, coming with new 0-day attacks every time.

So adblockers aren't just a convenient way of stopping the more shady sites from popping a million blinking commercials in your face, they're part of regiment to keep your PC as healthy as possible.

(Certainly with the current trend of commercialized trojan kits, which means every noob can whip up something that nestles itself in your MBR, stays invisible and undetectable to everything you can through at, can steal your passwords and inject any banking site with redirecting iframes. No sir, the internet is a wild an dangerous place.)

Slashdot's anti-ad rhetoric aside, content creators or rights holders have a right to monetize if they want to -- just as content consumers have a right to bypass that content. Everyone has a choice and everyone has other options.

Right now, the easiest path for those who want to skip ads is also the best-of-both-worlds path: You can consume the content you want *and* avoid the ads. Eventually, some (maybe a few, maybe many) content creators will simply not serve content unless they have confirmation that their monetization vehicle was served as well. Some sites will die because it turns out there are other options -- and many will thrive because people need what they've got.

If it *does* become a legal battleground, it'll be less about the macro and more about the micro. No one gives a fuck if there's one less or one more eyeball on some half-baked 9gag clone serving up commoditized CPM advertising. But a social-media ad that's relevant to maybe 100 people in the whole country? Advertisers -- and their attorneys -- damned well care if they're losing significant percentages on those hyper-targeted buys, which often carry a premium.

Anyone can file a lawsuit over just about anything..... So could advertisers decide to sue developers who made tools like Ad-Block? Of course!

I think the reason you haven't seen this happen so far (and why it may not happen in the future) is the relatively poor odds of winning such a case. First of all, you have to ask if users normally have the legal right to avoid viewing advertising that's presented to them. Clearly, there's vast evidence that they do, including the ability to change the channel on the TV when commercials come on.

One would have to successfully argue that somehow, contrary to all advertising ever created in the past, advertisers placing their ads on web sites enjoy a special legal protection where they can force viewers to view their ads.

They probably can kill AdBlock Plus (legally). As they tried to kill libdvbcss, at least. When this happens, people will find other ways to block. And advertisers will find new ways to attack blockers, and to pass their ads through. And so on.

"You could get a phantascopic system planted directly on your retinas, just as Bud's sound system lived on his eardrums. You could even get telaesthetics patched into your spinal column at various key vertebrae. But this was said to have its drawbacks: some concerns about long-term nerve damage, plus it was rumored that hackers for big media companies had figured out a way to get through the defenses that were built into such systems, and run junk advertisements in your peripheral vision (or even spang in t

there is no way to legislate a ban on adblockers and enforce that legislation.. absolutely no fucking way.. so that LAWYER that wrote article and the AD-SUPPORTED site that published it both need to find some other tree to bark up.

If ad blocking was a sufficiently large problem, there are far easier solution like embedding the ads harder in the content. For example transitional ads between pages, DOM pop-over ads, click-throughs that open a pop-up and whatnot. Imagine someone went through dead-tree newspapers and noted the ad locations, then gave/sold you that list to feed into your magic black marker ad remover machine. What possible grounds would you have to call that illegal? It's a legal battle they're sure to lose.

Back in the old days there was lots of talk and more than a couple of companies working on micropayment systems. The idea was that you could pay something like half a cent for a webpage. Prices could be adjusted depending on things like demand and target audience. Quality web sites would prosper, crappy ones would die out. All the good stuff you get from a free market.

But somewhere along the line, advertising usurped that role and no micropayment system ever achieved viability. So now we get useless ad-farms filled with seo-bait, articles on web-sites broken down into one paragraph a page to maximize ad-impressions and worst of all a brain-drain focused on spending billions of dollars for tracking systems to (presumably) more effectively target advertisements (never mind the societal cost of using these tracking system for other purposes) rather than creating new and innovative technology that would benefit man-kind in general.

So I welcome a show-down between advertisers and ad-blockers. There will be casualities, maybe even bullshit where adblock authors see some jail-time. But if the end result is that advertising recedes and we come up with another more straight-forward, less socially-destructive way to fund the creation of high-quality content on the internet it will be a huge step forward for society.

I use script block and flash block. But even when I get a level of mojo in site like DailyKos or Slashdot that enables me to block ads, I don't. If it gives these sites some revenue, it is all ok with me.

What I really want is a way to tell the advertisers my advertisement acceptance policy. I want to be able to say, "no flashing text, no moving images, no sound. No click to dismiss an obnoxious add blocking most of the content". It would be great if I can also specify a few keywords for products and services I am currently planning to buy, or topics of interest too.

As long as the ads are unobtrusive, I would not mind. But the advertises seem to be hell bent on being really really obnoxious and thrust their ads in my face.

BTW on what legal grounds can the attack ad-block? Can they force me watch TV ads instead of going to the bathroom? Or mute the TV when the ads or on? Can they stop me from turning over ad pages of the magazine without looking at them? Can they stop me from throwing away the classified section of the newspaper without looking at it? What if there is a company that will offer me the service of taking my magazine and rip out every ad page in it and then giving me a much slimmed down mag to carry on airplanes?

...content providers and the advertisers they partner with are not idiots. They will realize that trying to to legally force ad blockers off the net is not going to happen, no matter how much money they throw at it -- as long as every packet is treated the same way, ads can and will be filtered and their content pirated. They learned their lessons from the recording and motion picture industry, who lost control of their distribution channel thanks to recording and networking technologies.
What they will do is take control of the pipe that is carrying the content, so that they can control the distribution channel from end to end, the salient lesson to be learned from the recording and motion picture failures to adapt their business model to the internet. The internet backbone providers want this, so they already have a major ally in making that happen. Eventually, and sooner rather than later, network neutrality will be lost, and the internet will become very much a walled garden for the vast majority of our species, which is terribly, terribly sad.

I have several websites which have been up for well over a decade and are highly rated. Last year I was laid off my job and for the first time, started putting Google ads on my pages. I'm making a few hundred dollars per month from them. Yes, people do click on ads that interest them. I use only ads which are related to the subject of the page. I try hard not to annoy my visitors, no pop ups, pop unders, no ads in the text, no flashing obnoxiousness. No tracking.

I am embarrassed to admit that I use an adblock myself. I felt hypocritical so I turned it off for awhile. OMG. I had forgotten how bad it could be out there. I certainly don't blame my visitors for using an adlocker. I try not to punish those who don't.

Generally, the webmaster decides where and what type of ads will display. Blaming the advertisers is off base as they make a variety of ad sizes and types available but the webmaster chooses how far he goes with them. Perhaps try writing an email to the webmaster telling them that you find their site too annoying to visit again.

In a country where Internet Access is metered by usage forcing me to watch advertisements amounts to theft.

ESPECIALLY considering that MOST advertisements are obscenely huge either actual VIDEO or else more often HUGE flash files.

My obviously well documented history of flat out REFUSING to return to a site which either FORCES me to view ads or where I cannot successfully filter the ads shows that I have NO INTENTION of actually defrauding anyone of anything.

Legally, sites do NOT have a leg to stand on.

If your advertisements were NOT huge data-hogs and visually offensive (NB the advertising industry at one point claimed that lack of click-through was due to people not noticing their ads, which quite frankly FAILS THE LAUGH TEST) then I wouldn't be blocking them (eg Google text ads).

You do not need to block ads if you have some self-respect. You have to visit ad-free and payment free pages. Good luck for that.

Ok, I will play this game

Dear advertiser,

Do not force me into blocking your ads. I am all for your ability to derive revenue from advertising, but you have forced my hand by:

1). Pop-ups and/or pop-unders
2). Epilepsy-inducing colors flashing in your ads
3). Loud obnoxious voices from your ad that start talking when I am browsing the web (and listening to my music)
4). Flash videos that start playing and take up 99% of my CPU, slowing both the browser and sometimes the computer itself to an utter crawl.

No, I am a software developer from the EU, who happens to work on a somewhat popular web site, and I value both my work and the work of other people who create content which proves to be useful or at least entertaining for me. This is the reason for example why I never click on the disable ads checkbox here on Slashdot, buy all the games are rarely play nowdays, etc.

The latest is Dish's "Auto-Hop" feature which -- the day after it was aired -- programs ad skips into stuff recorded as part of their Hopper's "Prime-Time-Anytime" feature (which records all prime time shows on the big four using only one tuner). Of course FOX and everyone else filed suit at the first mention of it, even before

If the site you are talking to is, say, having your client make asynchronous javascript requests to the server and fill in assorted requisite fields in your visible web page, then there's not really any way, programatically, to tell on the client side whether any given content you receive will be useful content from the site or if it will be advertisements. If you have javascript disabled, you won't be able to view the content at all.

I remember in the '90s surfing the net on the T1 (1.5Mbps) at work. It was awesome, pages were instant, it quick, responsive, and enjoyable. Now surfing on a T1 isn't fast at all. The HTML on this page is 400KB alone, without compression, and with fast RTT that's still a 3 second download, then all the external calls to ads (which./ doesn't have too many), the size can easily reach 700KB. It's not hard to find pages that load many MBs of data. If it's all coming off one server with keep-alives, it's not to